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SEO Strategies that Work

Posted on May 5, 2011 by Joel Gross

If you’ve been listening to our videos or following our blog, you’ll know that we do quite a bit of competitive examination and comparison. A few phone conversations that I had this week with potential clients led me to believe that we needed to spend more time talking about how Coalition Technologies is fundamentally a different SEO company than our competitors. If you want a quick, visually more attractive synopsis, check out my Youtube posting below: (by the way, I hate how they always choose an awkward screen grab for these).

The primary point of discussion in the video is aimed at the fact that many SEO companies are strictly discussing back linking volume or keyword targeting volume. Most in the SEO community are well beyond the notion that simple volumes of back links and keyword targets are effective strategies. Why?

Primarily there are two reasons that SEO has outgrown back links and keyword targeting. Firstly, is the complexity of today’s search algorithms and the aggressiveness of their respective spam team. Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc all want to ensure that they can deliver the best, most relevant results (for the most part), and are trying to create algorithms that actually account for their analysis and tracking of user behavior. Numbers of back links and numbers of keyword targeted definitely don’t fit as a solution to respond to those complex, evolved search algorithms. As a for instance, the broader SEO community is still trying to figure out what Panda really did and who it was really aimed at, since the results its producing for different types of sites are so varied. You think a simple two step strategy can be the end all, be all strategy for that?

Secondly, there is the simple fact that keyword targeting and back linking in volume don’t account for user behavior in a thorough enough fashion to always equate to revenue. Where users come from (traffic source) influences their confidence in your company, your product, and your ability to successfully deliver. A quality back link, assures that not only is the referring site a high quality and highly relevant site in the search engine’s eyes, it also ensures that it could be a meaningful source of traffic and purchasing customers for your site. If I were running a website selling fashion accessories, I’d rather have a link from a leading fashion blog site, then from one hundred video game sites. Why? The readers of that fashion blog are more likely to purchase from you once, twice, thrice, and are more likely to tell someone else who might be interested in your product. The video game sites, even in the hundreds, probably are going to generate very low levels of traffic, and even lower levels of actual purchasing customers. And Google scores based on relevance of the link referral as well- that fashion blog site is going to count way more towards your page ranking then the video game sites. The same is true for keyword targeting. Ranking highly for specific targeted keywords can be great for your bottom line. Spending search engine optimization efforts on ranking for lots of keywords still doesn’t factor into whose going to be valuable to you. Ranking number one for DUI attorney Seattle might mean a huge influx of clients for a law firm, but ranking number one for DUI attorney without a location specific element might mean lots of traffic, but not as much clients for that Seattle law firm.

A great SEO company and firm, really approaches their work like they are going to provide marketing consulting. Not only are we intent on creating traffic, we want to create traffic that has value, that is likely to be reciprocating (meaning users will return to your site or tell a friend), and are going to purchase! The great SEO company’s in Los Angeles will all tell you that they are the new marketing and sales consulting firms of the web marketplace. We take our jobs seriously, and we understand that ranking is best done without the use of carpet bombing raids like massive back links and broad keyword targets.